The Black president Hope and fury in the age of Obama

Claude A. Clegg III (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is the author of An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (1997), The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (2004), and Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South (2010). In The Black President he sets out to explore the "Obama White House years, specifically how they were witnessed, experienced, and interpreted by African Americans" (p. x). In the process Clegg "captures the America that made Obama's White House years possible, while also rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive" (p. xi). The book is divided into eighteen chapters, spit into three parts. Part 1, "A Chronic Restlessness," reviews Obama's upbringing beginning with his birth in Hawaii to a Black father and a white mother. The young Obama was largely raised by his maternal grandparents while his parents pursued graduate degrees. Clegg describes Obama's educational path, beginning with his undergraduate career to his years as a community organizer in Chicago. To enhance his ability to create substantive change, he entered Harvard Law School in 1988, serving as editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduating magna cum laude in 1991. He spent the summer of 1989 as an associate in a Chicago law firm, mentored by Michelle Robinson. Though put off by his addiction to cigarettes, something he did not overcome until his early days in the White House, she found him intriguing. They married in 1992, moving to the Oak Park neighborhood of Chicago, where he broke into politics. Obama began the first of three terms in the Illinois Senate in 1997, followed by a partial term (2005--8) in the United States Senate. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention Obama gave an electrifying address that propelled him onto the national stage, setting up his 2008 run for the Democratic nomination against former First Lady Hilary Clinton. He went on to defeat the Republican nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain, for the presidency, at which point he resigned his senate seat. Part 2, "Hope and Change," is where Clegg discusses Obama's first term as president, including his most notable success: getting the Affordable Care Act (derisively referred to by hard-right opponents as "Obamacare") through Congress and signed into law. Perhaps more than any other accomplishment this, as the title of chapter 5 contends, showcased him as the "President of the Entire United States." Part 3, "The Best of Times, The Worst of Times" analyzes Obama's reelection to a second term and his defeat of Republican Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. An epilogue considers the shift from the liberal progress made during the Obama presidency to Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign, which further hardened the nation's political divisiveness. Under Trump and his core of extreme right-wing supporters, the Republican Party seemed to put their political agenda above democracy and the rule of law, unwilling to work across the aisle for the good of all. The epilogue presents a bleak picture that might have been a bit more nuanced, but still seems accurate. While it is far too early to determine the successes and failures of Barack Obama's two terms in the White House, it is possible to consider his initial election as the first person of color to the presidency and what that means relative to America's long-standing issue with race. It is obvious that those who believe we as a people are living in a supposedly post-racial environment are detached from reality. Central to The Black President is America's racial fixation. Not a passing obsession, race has been, and sadly continues to be, an idea baked into our history and our contemporary society. As to history, William Julius Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and Cornell West's Race Matters (1993) are only two of a myriad of scholarly studies that indicate the depth and breadth of racism in the United States. To his credit, Clegg makes this a central theme. If Clegg's biography has a shortcoming, it is the author's failure to look more deeply into the reasons why Americans (and the world in general) view Obama as Black, when he could also equally be considered white. He briefly touches on this in chapter 10, "Signifier in Chief," when he discusses how different Black entertainers perceived of Obama's racial identity. In a 2012 interview, Chris Rock termed Obama "'our zebra president'" (p. 254). Morgan Freeman pointedly described Obama as "'America's first mixed-race President,'" noting that Obama's mother was a "very white American [from] Kansas, middle of America'" (p. 255). In 2010 comedian Sinbad "took for granted Obama's Blackness [while] still not[ing] his relative uniqueness," suggesting that Obama would be the last Black politician to have been raised in Kansas and Hawaii and joking that "the next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what's it's really like'" (p. 255). Today people of diverse racial backgrounds are encompassed by the more inclusive term BIPOC--Black, Indigenous, and people of color. In years gone by, racially diverse individuals like Obama would have been classified by the one-drop rule--any individual with any Black ancestors, no matter how light their own skin, was considered Black. In James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), the protagonist passes as white in his public life but is Black in his private life. W. E. B. Du Bois also explored this phenomenon, describing the trauma created by having to manage dual identities and the fear of being found a fraud. It would be difficult to impossible not to write about race in a biography of Barack Obama. Until his election, race was never discussed in different presidential biographies as a factor in the life of any prior president, even if it often appeared as a subject of interest. Forty-three presidents before Obama needed no racial/ethnic designation, though some did celebrate the ethnic identities of their ancestors. When the Obamas moved into the "White" House, it was more a wrench for Michelle, whose forebears were slaves, than Barack. As the former first lady famously noted at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, "I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves." This thorny reality that must have caused more than a few mixed emotions for Michelle. In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson viewed the wildly popular racist film Birth of a Nation (1915) at a special White House screening, allegedly describing it as "like writing history with lightening." A century later Obama screened The Tuskegee Airmen (1995), the fictionalized account of the first all-Black air force unit formed during World War II. While the juxtaposition of the two films is stark, they demonstrate progress from the racism of Wilson to the more evenhanded attitude of Obama. A major failing of the Progressive Era was its inability to make any substantive progress relative to race relations, civil rights, or voter rights. A century later, the Black Lives Matter movement has focused attention on police violence against people of color, but to date has had little impact on race relations. Clegg's simile of Barack Obama as a "tightrope walker" (p. 179) is apt, especially in light of the book's subtitle: "Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama." A question that Clegg and the nation wrestled with is whether Obama was the president of the United States, or the Black president? The distinction came down to whether he would treat Black people deferentially because of their skin color to the detriment of white people. In his balanced approach, Clegg insists that throughout Obama's two terms any aid to any marginalized segment of society benefited the entire nation. Perhaps the most obvious example, the Affordable Care Act, offered access to health care to millions of Americans, white and Black, Republican and Democrat. Understanding Obama's presidency through this lens means that while he was a Black man, he was not "The Black President," though being Black and being the president did coincidentally raise the hopes and aspirations for those who believed his election might bring the nation closer to the ideal espoused in the Declaration of Independence. Though this was more dream than reality, Obama's election did inspire some Americans to view the United States as a supposedly post-racial society. Unfortunately, from this reviewer's perspective, the 2016 election took the nation backward, making the racial divide wider and more entrenched. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University